Natural language interfaces have failed repeatedly. And so have attempts at the semantic web.

What does work and scales is more free form as is the case with the Web today.

And Google makes "free form" work.

there are people out there that cant write in C. Does that mean good programs wouldnt have been written in it?

Remember Cuil? Fostering press that you're an X killer is a good sign of future failure.

you havent even tried it yet. How is it possible το compare two different products? You can put two different people implement the same concepts in algorithms and you will get two different results and you compare a whole product because others failed?

Read the thread again, I was simply giving an example of a similar failed story. Wolfram may or may not fail at this, I simply believe hype of a Google killer before launch is a bad sign.

I can appreciate Empiricism as much as the next guy, but Google Search, Cuil, and Alpha seem comparable.

edit: the dreaded homonym! I mean they can be meaningfully compared to each other, not that they are the equivalent.